Introduction
Healthcare facilities implement diverse technology tools to improve nursing practices and patient care, where service excellence and commendable quality are the most desirable outcomes. Hospitals create care plans and other interventional techniques based on the various needs and service gaps, slowing organizational growth or client handling capacities. Scholarly articles provide actionable frameworks and insights for tackling quality achievement quagmires, especially by recommending innovative technology quality enhancements.
Others provide evidence of the impacts achieved by implementing suggested interventions, indicating that repeated practices with reliable procedures can be efficacious when dealing with patients. However, healthcare organizations must remember the importance of collaborative implementations, where care-plan outcomes uphold diversity among the nursing staff and facility stakeholders. The new technologies improve nursing practices and patient management effectiveness, helping to achieve efficacious outcomes through joint interventions, especially by using IT.
Continuous Vital Signs Monitoring
Continuous monitoring of vital signs is a nursing intervention technique for ensuring the timely detection of patient health progress, especially when clinical signs deteriorate. The first article, called “Current evidence for Continuous Vital Signs Monitoring by wearable wireless devices in Hospitalized Adults”, written by Leenen et al. (2020), focuses on analyzing the impacts of wearable devices for monitoring vital signs among recovering patients. Although a wide variety of clinical cases can require continuous monitoring, patients in intensive and medium care, especially those recovering from operations and others in recovery wards, need close checkups the most (Leenen et al., 2020).
Leenen et al. (2020) described the development and the implementation of wearable sensors with digital technology capabilities that can promote nurse-patient communications without impeding patient mobility. The procedures are defined in detail with the difficulties of implementing such digital technology. Innovative technologies for wearables in healthcare are so advanced that nurses and caretakers can manipulate algorithms to specify the monitoring services needed (Leenen et al., 2020). The best way to understand the study outcomes on the impacts of wearable technology in vital signs monitoring is by analyzing the study methodology and research procedures.
A researcher’s theoretical framework categorizes major models explaining the phenomenon, albeit from a generalized perspective. Leenen et al.’s (2020) study provided a generalized perspective on the theoretical background of digital technologies for client monitoring. One of the shortcomings is limited empirical evidence of the technology’s effectiveness. The gaps identified within the literature analysis on scientific evidence supporting the intervention motivated further studies to support the empirical studies on IT and vital signs monitoring.
However, Leenan et al. (2020) quoted previous studies supporting wearable technology as an efficacious intervention that can mitigate adverse clinical events through early detection. Moreover, the innovative techniques for manufacturing monitoring devices undergo rapid improvements that indicate continuous rollouts, resulting in clinically reliable tools (Leenen et al., 2020). However, the experimental design for the intervention analysis weakens the study quality, given that no raw data were used to derive reliability inferences.
The authors resorted to a systematic review of existing literature sources despite stating earlier that limited scientific evidence negatively impacts intervention reliability and accuracy, which are useful when making recommendations. The methodology used for the intervention examination was a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) design which entails refined search strategies and validation analyses on articles selected for the review (Leenen et al., 2020).
Therefore, Leene et al. (2020) resorted to existing empirical evidence rather than comparing experimental and control groups using primary research methodologies. The authors selected a few eligibility factors based on study quality to assess intervention outcomes for using wearable devices on clinical monitoring, such as the article origin and study methodology, publication sources, and research outcomes. One of the study’s shortcomings is that systematic reviews could not be reliable enough to help identify risks such as biases of individual studies in the original articles (Leenen et al., 2020). Interestingly, the authors managed to pull several variables to explain the impacts of wearable technologies in clinical monitoring.
Feasibility outcome in the systematic review was one of the vital variables denoting how effectively the tools can improve patient care quality. The variabilities were not part of the initial interventions, such as short battery life, clinical outcome factor, and cost outcome. Leenen et al. (2020) observed that most nurses reported short battery life or poor device connections, although the tools provided improved insights into client vital signs and deterioration possibilities. The other variable was the clinical outcome factor, where expected intervention outcomes were reductions in unexpected deaths, continuously improved reporting, and improved alert-initiated interventions (Leenen et al., 2020).
Leenen et al. (2020) also considered cost outcome variables for the systematic review, albeit no article reported healthcare savings upon monitoring technology implementations. The cost outcome variable could have impacted the vital signs intervention in that hospital administrators could easily consider the new technology if it guaranteed savings on scarce facility resources.
There was no evidence of efforts to monitor participant safety because ethical considerations on primary data collection techniques were not applicable in the intervention research. Systematic reviews with secondary data sources reduce the time and resources needed to interact with human participants, although they cannot guarantee reliable outcomes like in primary research. Raw data interpretation provides more reliable outcomes with first-hand experiences in an intervention impact than using secondary data (Tappen, 2016).
The article also allocates quantitative data managed in designed databases for reliable intervention outcome interpretation and continuous improvement. Leenen et al.’s (2020) research could have improved by changing the methods to primary quantitative data collection techniques with analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests for interpreting empirical data outcomes. Data reliability and validity determine research outcomes because first-hand experiences can be more credible than reported secondary data.
Health Information Technology in Patient Care
The second scholarly article for nursing intervention analysis, called “Use of health information technology in patient care management” contains ideas on technology implementation for service improvement. The author’s primary objective in the research was to determine the roles played by information technology in improving patient care (Askari-Majdabadi et al., 2019). The mixed method research entailed data gathering through observational checklists and questionnaires. There were specific challenges associated with the study, especially considering the high prevalence of computer illiteracy among nurses and other healthcare workers, yet the researchers collected data via digital questionnaires (Askari-Majdabadi et al., 2019).
For instance, most healthcare facilities did not record evidence of patient healthcare progress. The rationale is that personnel in those facilities followed a single communication channel, where nurses take instructions from doctors and execute client care without documentation. The observational checklist data quality became the most affected information source, albeit Askari-Majdabadi et al. (2019) used questionnaire data to complement the checklist shortcomings. Although questionnaire data overcame checklist data shortage challenges, it uncovered the experimental weaknesses which can be rectified to promote effective outcomes in future studies.
Future efforts and improvement can be achieved by selecting healthcare facilities with standardized data entry systems to investigate information technology’s roles in patient care improvements. The rationale is that information accuracy through reliable data is a strong pillar in research outcomes, implying that researchers must paint the correct picture by obtaining as much raw data as possible. Interestingly, Askari-Majdabadi et al. (2019) showed that most nurses are satisfied with computerized systems for handling client information and care details. However, the authors tested only two variables: discharge of patient communications and patient transfers (Askari-Majdabadi et al., 2019). The authors could not test two more variables: evidence retrieval during the care process and IT implementation in radiological diagnostic procedures. The rationale is that most facilities need to train their nurses on advanced IT functions to improve the quality of patient care.
It would be easier to paint a clearer picture of the two unexplored variables if the authors selected facilities with centralized data systems and nurse training on IT coordination. The potential study pitfall is that unexplored variables undermine the weight behind IT implementation impacts in healthcare. For instance, if clinical evidence retrieval and radiological diagnostic procedure impacts scored as high as 90% and above in responded data outcomes, they would have added more weight to IT relevance in patient care coordination.
Conclusion
The current paper analyzed two mentioned articles to estimate the efficiency of joint interventions in the sphere of technology development and implementation. The first article analyzed above demonstrated the effectiveness of wearable technologies in monitoring vital signs. However, the results were less convincing than in the second article, given the systematic review methodology shortcomings and data insufficiency. Although the second article contains primary data on the role of IT in patient care improvement, it has two operationalized variables because the authors needed to locate facilities with standardized data entry systems. In other words, the effectiveness of developing and implementing technologies and nursing interventions improves nursing practices and patient care.
References
Askari-Majdabadi, H., Valinejad, A., Mohammadpour, A., Bouraghi, H., Abbasy, Z., & Alaei, S. (2019). Use of health information technology in patient care management: A mixed methods study in Iran. Acta Informatica Medica, 27(5), 311-317. Web.
Leenen, J. P., Leerentveld, C., van Dijk, J. D., van Westreenen, H. L., Schoonhoven, L., & Patijn, G. A. (2020). Current evidence for continuous vital signs monitoring by wearable wireless devices in hospitalized adults: Systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(6), e18636. Web.
Tappen, R. (2016). Advanced nursing research: From theory to practice (2nd ed.). Jones and Bartlett.